(TV) OT: The Clash (New Book)

["Casey, Leo J" <Leo.J.Casey@Volpe.dot.gov>]

As usual, because you have to be a Boston Globe subscriber, there is no
workable 
web-link to this article.  Despite little mention of the music itself, it's
moderately interesting 
in providing some new information.   

REVISITING THE LAST GANG IN TOWN THE CLASH AND 
ITS POTENT MIX OF NIHILISM, IMAGERY 

The Boston Globe, 05/29/2005,  Page: D7,  Section: Books; Book Reviewer:
James Parker  

BOOK REVIEW:  "Passion Is a Fashion: The Real Story of The Clash" 
Author:  Pat Gilbert; Da Capo, 404 pp., paperback, illustrated, $18.95

For a book about the Clash, around whom as a matter of aesthetic identity
101 slogans, 
buzzwords, calls to arms, and zingy subcultural brand names were always in
motion, 
"Passion Is a Fashion" is an astonishingly flaccid choice of a title. One
would think it 
better suited to the story of some tinkling synth-pop outfit, like Erasure
or Nine Inch 
Nails. Having said that, let's move swiftly on to the book's virtues, which
are many.

The Clash was a West London band that started out opening for the Sex
Pistols and ended 
(the original lineup, at least) opening for the Who. They were
rabble-rousers whose lead singer 
was the privately educated son of a Foreign Office diplomat, punk-rock shock
troops with an 
image as carefully manufactured as the Backstreet Boys'. This is a
complicated, contradictory 
story, and Pat Gilbert (a former editor at the British music magazine MOJO)
tells it lucidly and 
readably, at a brisk, even pace, with no visible ax to grind and plenty of
new information. The 
clearest indicator of the book's success is this: Upon reading it one
desires urgently, even 
desperately, to hear the music of the Clash.

As rock stars, the Clash had real wattage. The band was first formed in the
mind of manager-impresario 
Bernie Rhodes, as a sort of politicized Sex Pistols, but its handpicked
members soon outshone the 
original design. One source in Gilbert's book describes his first exposure
to the Clash front line left to 
right, preening guitar hero Mick Jones, fireball vocalist Joe Strummer, and
Paul Simonon on bass, 
semi-competent but gorgeous as "like seeing three Eddie Cochrans." And once
the puckish drummer 
Topper Headon had installed himself behind them, they were more or less
unstoppable (until Headon's 
heroin habit pulled the plug).

The combination of rock 'n' roll classicism and radical grievance was heady
but unstable; Strummer, as 
the group's orator, frequently fell on his face. "All the people who own the
factories," he suggested in an 
early interview, "who drive a Rolls-Royce, you get rid of them somehow and
put them in a camp." 
But to cavil at the band's posturing and occasional buffoonery (Gilbert
records, for example, 
Strummer's misspelling of the Italian for Red Brigade on a homemade T-shirt)
is to miss the point: 
The Clash, as an entity, was larger than life, and by continual reference to
revolutionaries, global 
disruptions, ideological tipping points, etc., it gathered its fans into a
good-vs.-bad super-reality 
that empowered and perhaps even enlightened them. Gilbert calls this
Strummer's 
"cartoonist's worldview."

Research-wise Gilbert has done some serious legwork, tracking down
schoolmates, roommates, 
bandmates, layers and layers of mates plus about three women, which is the
usual ratio for this genre. 
He disinters old hippy confreres of Strummer's, from the pre-1976 days when
he went by the 
name "Woody" and tended graves for a living. He interviews the designer
Sebastian Conran, 
who knocked about with the Clash for a year and a half and helped them make
their fatigue-style 
"Clash trousers" before being "purged" for excessive poshness.

Which brings us to the aspect of the Clash story that may bemuse US readers
its nonstop, 
utterly English crackle of acute class consciousness. When Andy Warhol went
with his friend 
Susan to see the band play in New York, he recorded the event thus in his
book "Exposures": 
"The Clash are the hottest punk band since the Sex Pistols. . . . They're
really young kids from 
very poor English families. On the way there, Susan said, `They hate the
rich. They're worse 
than working class.' " If only it were that simple, that Warhol-ish!
Strummer was a class migrant, 
having drifted down to street level from a solid perch in the bourgeoisie,
changing his name from 
John Mellor to Woody to Joe Strummer and roughening his accent as he went.
His background 
would always be (as Gilbert puts it) "a hot potato" for the Clash.

The surprise in "Passion Is a Fashion" is that not even Jones, who lived
with his grandmother on the 
18th floor of a West London high-rise, survives with his proletarian
credentials intact. 
"Is he middle class?" sneers Rhodes in an interview with Gilbert. "Yes, of
course 
he is! . . . I think you're very naive."

"Mick's dad was a taxi driver and mine was a bricklayer," says band enabler
Kosmo Vinyl. 
"We had similar backgrounds, living in flats and so on. But what class that
makes us, I don't know."

Another surprise in Gilbert's book is the emergence of the looming, taciturn
bass player as 
a crucial figure in the Clash story. Paul Simonon (whose name is a reggae
baseline all by itself) was 
an exemplar of what Londoners at the time called "suss" a combination of
smarts and cool something 
to which the constantly self-inventing Strummer and the more fragile Jones
could only aspire. He was 
also a more than talented artist; it was Simonon who perfected the
paint-spattering technique with which 
the Clash customized their clothing, who supervised the stenciling of
slogans onto shirts and boilersuits, 
and who, not unimportantly, came up with the band's name.

The shadow of Strummer's death (he died in late 2002, at the age of 50, of
heart failure) lies long over 
the last section of "Passion Is a Fashion": He deserves a book of his own,
and will doubtless get it. 
We can only hope that his biographer will be as clear-eyed and conscientious
as Gilbert.

[Reviewer, James Parker is the author of "Turned On: A Biography of Henry
Rollins." He lives in Brookline.]
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